Every Sunday afternoon through August, come enjoy live music in the great outdoors at the Humboldt Botanical Garden 2026 Summer Music Series.

Edith Sachs and Alfred “Henk” Pennekamp were German refugees when they met in exile in Belgium in 1935 or 1936. They were married in 1940 in Lewisburg, New Jersey, just weeks after Henk’s — my father — surprise release from a French concentration camp for German and Austrian anti-fascists, intellectuals and J...

All I can say to young people is, place your courage before courtesy and question everything they, the unkind, tell you. Ask yourself, Am I a lemming? Do I bundle myself in the jail bars of fascism? BE KIND BE KIND BE KIND Kate L. Hitt, Blue Lake

I was born at 7 p.m. on July 4, 1949 — 77 years ago. In the U.S., about 900,000 others have July 4th birthdays, so I’m not unusual. After all, there also are about 900,000 people in the U.S. who were born in Colombia. About 900,000 people live in Austin, Jacksonville or San Jose. About 900,000 Toyota Corollas...

As a self-described writer, the First Amendment — Free Speech, etc. — guarantees my favorite freedoms. For one thing, it allows me to be a highly respected commentator for the prestigious Senior News. What? Senior News? Yes. It’s a newspaper with thoughtful, insightful and at times humorous articles of specia...

I want to thank Dr. Keith Flamer for convening the New Vision for Humboldt Health Care Task Force (see “A Call to Action,” May Senior News, page 1). This effort of local community and business leaders deserves our full attention and support.

We all too often forget and cannot neglect life’s demons. They cannot be eradicated without seriously believing that they are real. Femicide is such a demon. The term “femicide” is rarely used in official U.S. statistics, as murders of women are normally categorized as homicides.

To the Editor: Were you perplexed as I was over the May “Health in Humboldt 2026” issue of Senior News? As in this issue, recent local forums have addressed the current defective state of healthcare availability in Humboldt County. While pertinent questions have been asked along with recognition that our curr...

To the Editor: I want to thank Dr. Heidmann for her March column “What is Good Health?” As a participant of Redwood Coast PACE, I was encouraged by her words and insights. I live daily with chronic illness and pain, and her last paragraph has become a great way for me to focus on my health: “Good health is, a...

Hypertension literally means “too much strain,” referring to the pressure against the walls of arteries. People likely have known about it since ancient times, maybe noticing pulses being harder than usual and even noticing things like salt making that worse, but the Western World did not start regularly trea...

Well, maybe it is for some things — I’m not going to be a ballerina, although I did sign up for ballet classes when I turned 80. It was great for balance, flexibility and short-term memory. I was not preparing for the corps de ballet, so there was no pressure to perform. Two years ago, a friend who is a big r...

The older we get, the more meaningful and significant the opportunities and inherent power of being able to choose become. I have found that the loss of a loved one challenges the very nature of my capacity to choose. Miriam-Webster defines choice as, “the act of picking or deciding between two or more possib...

My poor parents. Devout Southern Baptists, they permitted minimal TV in our house. Music? Cue the hymnal. Two church services on Sunday and one on Wednesday evenings were the week’s outings. The only movies we were allowed were religious (e.g., “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben Hur”) or Disney (“Cinderella” and...

They don’t wake to breakfast in bed or hand-drawn cards slipped under the door. There is no chorus of “Happy Mother’s Day” or “Happy Father’s Day” rising from the hallway. Instead, a cry comes at 2:14 a.m., thin as a wire, insistent as weather. The quiet arithmetic of survival — diapers, deadlines, rent, slee...

This month, Senior News is all about those revered paragons, mothers and fathers. Because, as John Steinbeck said, “It takes courage to raise children.” For context, I reread tributes I wrote for both parents’ memorials, which made me a little weepy. Mom was 84 in 2014 when she went on to “The Next Big Thing....

Throughout my childhood, there were long trips down from Santa Monica to Corona Del Mar with Mom, Dad and my two sisters, Janet and Debbie. All us kids sat in the back of my dad’s white flatbed truck, clinging to the wooden guardrails while we whipped down the highway at 70 mph. Can’t do anything fun like tha...

Lavina Bowers, the matriarch of her large Yurok family, sits with her daughter, Susan Masten, in the living room of her home, perched above the mouth of the Klamath River on a shoulder of Req-woi Hill. Below is the stretch of the river where Lavina, when she was 43, and her mother, Geneva Mattz, then 74, rowe...

If you ever thought you saw the ground rolling in an earthquake, it was not your imagination. Memories are life-sustaining. In my line of work, they can also be data, I so appreciate the memories many of you sent about the 1954 earthquake (see “What Your 1954 Earthquake Memories Told Us,” Senior News, Novembe...

Back in the early ‘60s, our family (well, actually my dad) had a water-skiing boat on Lake Almanor, over in Plumas County. We would make an all-day affair of it. Mom made a picnic lunch and my brother and I and our friends took turns falling off the water skis and almost drowning while Dad drove the boat and ...

One day when I was about 10, I was shooting baskets in our driveway with my best buddy. My brother, John, 16 and the proud bearer of a new driver’s license, drove in and stopped short of the garage.